South Fayette resident gets to 'play' for a living

South Fayette (Bridgeville) resident Brad Bendis was a huge Johnny Cash fan when he was a teenager. He begged his parents for a guitar so that he could learn to play and sing just like him. He received that guitar as a gift from his parents in November 2003. Bendis then brought it everywhere, including South Fayette High School, where he occasionally played it in class when he was not supposed to. He became known as the “guy with the guitar.”

Graduating from South Fayette in 2007, he went on to receive an associate degree in small business management from Community College of Allegheny County while performing sporadically during the next 10 years.

He decided to make music his full-time job about four years ago.

“Word of mouth has been the best marketing tool for me, but finding gigs is the part of my job that is really hard work,” Bendis said.

He is keeping busy locally all around the South Hills and beyond, always continuing to search for new performance venues. In 2019 he hopes to release an album of songs that were written by his close friend, Ted Aiken, a retired Moon Area High School teacher who passed away from cancer in 2013. He may also head down to Key West with some friends and possibly play at some sites while he visits.

Although he initially may have been influenced by Johnny Cash, his current show covers a wide variety of music in rock, country, folk and blues genres.

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our
Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments either by the same reader or different readers

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

We do not edit comments. They are either approved or deleted. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation.

We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don't want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly.

We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent
via e-mail. To avoid distracting other readers, we won't publish comments that suggest a correction. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.